What if the primary mission for a particular artillery assault is to destroy the enemies weapons factories, and weapons stores, to hasten the end of the war, thereby perhaps saving more lives than are lost?
It's all well and good to say that these women were in the business of killing, but sometimes, war comes to you, you don't go looking for war. At that point your options are to fight, or to become a victim.
Put another way, I suppose that from the standpoint of an American, it's better that a German, Italian, or Japanese soldier dies, than that an American soldier dies. You don't have the choice of whether *someone* dies in such a case, you can only influence *who* is/are the ones dieing.
If you must fight, then it seems to me that the most moral choice is to hit your enemy as devastatingly as you can, as quickly as you can, to try to end the war as soon as you can. If you're going to hit a man, hit him hard enough he doesn't want to get back up and fight again, so to speak. I think in recent times, the expression "Shock and Awe" has been applied to this idea - convince your enemy it's not worth fighting, then you don't have to kill him. (Of course, it's hard to wage a shock and awe campaign against a guerrilla army, so it doesn't apply so much in asymmetric warfare scenarios).
Normally, I would agree with you, but the DDoS, in particular, upon the credit card companies was an organized, concerted effort by a *group* of people all working together. They all communicate together in a common forum (4chan). They aren't acting individually, they are acting corporately.
"What also puzzles me, is why cultures that create such structures, just kinda sorta die out? Like the Egyptians who built pyramids, whoever built Stonehenge, and the like?"
Every culture (well, there might be one or two exceptions, I don't know), at least most, die out once enough time passes, for a variety of reasons.
Look at the Egyptians first the Greeks conquered them, and started intermarrying with them and influencing/changing their cultures, then the Romans, then eventually, the Arab Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula invaded and conquered them.
Ethnic and Cultural intermixing is the natural path of all societies, sooner or later. Eventually that mixing happens to such a degree that we say that a new people have emerged - but they still carry on the genetic and cultural legacies of the peope's that they descended from. The ethnicities/cultures that are most 'pure' at this point, I believe, are mostly the ones that due to geography, were the most isolated for the longest periods of time.
Civil Disobedience is, as far as I know, marked by breaking unjust laws, and then *accepting the consequences* by going to jail, or whatever, to show society the unjustness of the laws, and to win sympathy to your cause.
I believe Anonymous stepped way over the line of Civil Disobedience long ago, with retaliation upon retaliation and attempting to avoid being caught. I really just have to view Anonymous as largely a group of criminals who deserve to be in jail for engaging in openly criminal activity - I can't see that laws which make it illegal to perform DDoSes against legal businesses, or to make unauthorized access to other people's computers, are fundamentally unjust.
These guys are definitely not in the same class as the followers of Ghandi or MLK.
What's wrong with comparing it to the Y2K bug? Oh, yeah, that's right, the Y2K bug was actually fixed in a timely fashion and the vast, vast majority of computers were ready for new years' day, 2000. Whereas IPv6 isn't comparable because people are listening and starting to implement change.
Also, there's no real 'hard-and-fast' deadline like there was with the Y2K bug - exhaustion of IPv4 address space won't cause the Internet to suddenly collapse - it will just begin to cause gradually escalating levels of pain, and slow down the rise of innovative new Internet services, websites, and companies, while driving up costs due to artificial scarcity.
My first amendment trumps your engineering license law: What part of, "Congress shall make no law. ..abridging. ..the right of the people. ..to petition the government for a redress of grievances." doesn't this guy understand?
You don't need a license, and the government cannot require a license, for a person to send in a letter petitioning the government for a redress of grievances. End of story. The government is free to ignore the petition, if engineers deem it to be technically flawed (or even if the engineers agree *grin*), but no law may be used to abridge the right of the people to petition the government which is exactly what this guy did.
Why is it so many government employees seem to lack a basic understanding of the Constitution?
On the downside, you're right, I agree that public IPv4 addresses will become something which becomes more expensive.
One of the things right now which is fighting against the wider adoption of IPv6 is that there's "no demand from end users" for IPv6. If you're ISP starts charging (or for people already paying for a static address or block, starts charging considerably more) for public IPv4 addresses, and people know that by switching to IPv6 they get free addresses, that creates demand for IPv6 ISP support, home routers, etc. If you can save $60/year using IPv6, as a home user, or hundreds to thousands of dollars a year for larger organizations, it might be financially worthwhile upgrading.
We likely won't need an IPv6 replacement until we've colonized most of the Universe. The IPv6 address space is 128 bits long, although the lower 64 bits are reserved for individual host addresses, so we could view the address space as being 65 bits wide.
That gives us 2^65 addresses, more or less.
2^65 = 3.68934881 Ã-- 10^19
So, that's 36.89 QUINTILLION addresses. That's really, really, a lot of addresses. To put this in perspective, according to WikiPedia, there's 100-400 Million stars in the Milky Way. If 50% of those stars had 1 colonizable planet, and we wanted to create an Intergalactic Internet (which, of course, would require faster-than-light comms, but, hey, this is just an example), so that we colonized 200 Million planets, each planet could have:
So, you get somewhere around 184 Billion addresses per planet. That's not an exact number, because, remember, I treated the address space as 65 bits. That's because you get a 64 bit network prefix, and a 64 bit host address. A network, however, can have more than 2 addresses (which, the simplification of saying we have 65 bits of addresses basically assumes an average of 2 hosts per network), so this estimate is probably actually low. On the other hand, allocation guidelines also 'waste' a lot of the address space (like saying that every household and small business should get their own/56 and larger businesses and organizations should get a/48, so that they can run their own subnets if they want), but we actually have plenty of address space to waste (no, really, we do - worst case scenario is that the IPv6 address space is basically 48 bits wide - that's still a LOT of network prefixes).
In general, I'm not a big fan of all the proposals by ISPs to limit user traffic, cap data, etc.
But, it seems to me that clamping down on DDoS's initiated by zombie networks would be a fabulous use of the related technologies. If the ISPs really want to cut down on traffic, start cutting off all the traffic from botnet zombies.
I wonder if they could even, using Deep Packet Inspection, figure out what traffic was specifically from the botnet, and refuse to route that traffic, while still allowing legitimate traffic (e.g. the user browsing the web with their web browser, playing online games, sending email, etc) from the same machines.
The 'catch' seems to be two things, near as I can tell:
1) A regulatory environment which does a good job of keeping us safe, but doesn't know how to handle the emergence of new technologies very well. I believe there are some substantial regulatory hurdles vis-a-vis any new nuclear reactor, which are not appropriate to Molten Salt Reactors, because they are pretty different from conventional Light Water Reactors.
2) R&D - Industry does some R&D, but most utility companies have no interest in spending 500 Million or a Billion dollars on basic research for 10 or 20 years before they'll be able to bring a product to market.
Probably, there'd be some utilities interested in investing in building LFTRs (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, another name for a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor), but who are not in the business of fundamental R&D. Someone needs to do the R&D first.
Vermont appears to be embracing the doctrine of efficiency. . . and they're probably about to lose the State's largest private employer - IBM has given warning that if the price of electricity rises the 25% which is expected when they shut down the state's only nuclear power plant next year, IBM will shut down their Vermont facility and move elsewhere. Meanwhile, a Vermont State Senator who sits on key committees related to this issue is on the record saying that the idea that everyone can have all the energy they want is "outdated".
I'm not exactly an "anti-efficiency" person (I use CFL bulbs at home, I try to minimize unnecessary driving, I live with the heat set kind of cool in my apartment and wear sweaters, etc), but you can't just hand-wave over the problem and say you just need more efficiency. Let's work on efficiency, but in the meantime, let's also work on making sure there's enough energy supply for everyone. Like the other poster mentioned, efficiency *and* increased generation, until the efficiency gains make it unnecessary to add more generation.
Also, there's one other thing to keep in mind. Nuclear energy, at least, is NOT SCARCE. There's really not a strong argument for saving a resource which is abundant. We can't possibly exhaust all the nuclear energy available in the world, at least in the time left before the Sun dies, and consumes the earth in fire (which is estimated to be in about 500 Million years, and we know about nuclear energy resources to last something like 700 Million years) - and that's just with fission.
Assuming we crack the fusion 'nut', then not only do we have 700 Million years worth of fission energy, but also Billions (maybe Trillions?) of years' worth of fusion energy.
Efficiency is looking to solve a problem we don't have - energy scarcity. I mean, *yes*, RIGHT NOW, in a world economy largely dependent on fossil fuels, we have energy scarcity problems. But, people resist the very solution to that problem - Molten Salt Reactors running on Thorium can make energy scarcity very much a problem of the past. They are inherently safe, clean, and should be very cheap (compared to current fission plant designs), as well.
I think there is a place for manufacturing, and jobs in manufacturing plants could still be good jobs - they're just different than in the past - more about maintaining the machines that make the stuff, than making it yourself. It also means a much smaller workforce per factory.
I actually think that a lot of Obama's proposals generally speak to issues that can help us have a revival of manufacturing, despite the ZDNet author's "outrage" that Obama has ceded manufacturing. ..
1) Getting more competitive tax rates: as much as people like to complain that corporations don't pay their 'fair share of taxes', the truth is corporations don't pay taxes - their customers do. Also, in a world of globalization, it becomes pretty easy for companies in a lot of industries to pack up and move to other countries with lower tax rates (of course, there are always types of businesses which *can't* move, because they are location-dependent - health care, energy, shipping, retail in-store sales, etc).
From a fundamental point of realism, the only way we can be attractive to businesses which are able to locate anywhere, is to have competitive tax rates. If we're the highest in the world, lots of businesses will move (or have already).
2) Taxes is only a part of the competitiveness picture - Obama also proposed simplifying government bureaucracy and regulations, to make businesses simpler. If the government can actually do that, that should make us a more attractive place to do business.
3) Lawsuit reform - I think Obama just talked about this in regards to medical malpractice lawsuits - which would be a good start by helping to reduce costs of healthcare back down to sane levels. But, let's extend this idea everywhere - reasonable lawsuits, are of course, necessary, but there's way too many lawsuits, with awards for way too many dollars, in the U.S.
Patent Trolls make it so any innovative company is almost guaranteed to be sued for patent infringement. Liability suits make it so any company is constantly living at the risk of big personal injury lawsuits, etc.
Try to build almost any sort of large industrial business in the U.S. and you'll get delayed for years by lawsuits by environmental activists groups, etc. That's part of the reason it's very hard and very expensive to build nuclear plants in the U.S. It's my understanding that's why no new petroleum refineries have been built in the U.S. for something like 20 or 30 years - they can't find a site to build a new refinery because of NIMBY lawsuits making it impossible. You can't build LNG transport terminals anywhere to import/export Natural Gas on ocean tankers.
If we want more jobs, particularly industry/manufacturing jobs in the U.S. we need to make it *possible* for companies to site and build facilities without decades of lawsuits and regulatory compliance issues making it impossible.
4) Obama talked about reducing the number of agencies that have overlapping control over various aspects of business (that whole Salmon example he gave) - that sure sounds like a reasonable, good proposal, and HEY, it might even reduce government spending by increasing efficiency, if you can do that, as well as making it easier to do business here.
5) Energy: Access to as much reliable, affordable electrical power as they need, is vital for any industry. After looking at this issue for about 2 years now, I currently think our best option right now to actually achieve that, while minimizing environmental hard, is Nuclear Power. The democrats are still a bit too enamored, I think, of wind and solar, and may squander a lot of money and opportunities by spending too much on the so-called "alternatives", and not enough on Nuclear, which is already proven to be safe, reliable, and able to produce abundant amounts of power.
We have a relatively small amount of nuclear plants in the U.S. - about 100 right now. For various reasons, we haven't built a single new reactor in about 15 or 20 years (I think the last new reacto
The reason I would be highly surprised is that, among other things, I would expect this first release to remove every single occurence of the TRADEMARKED name OpenOffice.org.
Since I would expect OpenOffice to name its install directory, user config files/directory, and binary files using that trademark, and I would expect LibreOffice to rename all those things, I wouldn't really expect an overwrite. Basically, if LibreOffice includes the trademarked name anywhere in their distribution of the software, Oracle can sue them for trademark infringement (even though the code itself is GPL).
Possibly, there could be a library problem. E.g. on Linux, shared library files (.so) are usually installed to/lib,/usr/lib, or a couple other common directories. It might be possible that LibreOffice would ship with the same libraries, but a newer, incompatible version, which then might cause a problem for OpenOffice, but usually, library files include a version string as part of the library file's name, so that you can have multiple versions of the same libraries installed side-by-side.
So, really, they should probably show up to the OS as two completely different applications, even though one is a fork of the other.
If you're going to make movies, make movies. Requiring people to go to multiple other media to understand the movies is a recipe for failure. Most people expect the series of movies to form a coherent storyline without any important 'missing bits'. I don't mind video games, comic books, or short animations, but they should add to the universe in such a way that it doesn't leave holes in the main story told in the 'primary media'.
I don't know for sure, but seems to me there might be another factor here - duration. Lightning flash quite quickly, maybe a second at the longest. These morons with the lasers, if they happen to have good hand-eye coordination, might be able to track the aircraft pretty well, and keep the laser generally 'focused' on the cockpit windshield for several seconds at a time. I imagine it's sort of the difference between driving with occasional lightning flashes, vs having an oncoming vehicle shining their high-beams in your eyes for 5 or 10 seconds (which, at least for me, feels like an eternity when I'm driving at night, and am having a hard time seeing the road - and in just the wrong situation, might be long enough to cause an accident).
I believe, so far, there have been no fatalities as a result of these clowns, but should an aircraft ever crash, and the flight data recorder has the pilot complaining about being blinded by a laser, this will blow up into a huge media issue.
"tagging" something with an "encryption key" is something which doesn't make a lot of sense. I guess maybe someone would want to search for the file based on the key it was encrypted with? *grin*
You know an article is quality when stupid crap like that shows up in the very first paragraph. Who do these big media outlets hire to do their sci/tech articles anyhow? Apparently people who haven't got the faintest clue how things work, or how to explain to others how they work. Somehow, they seem to consistently find the absolutely *least qualified* people to write such articles.
Instead of attacking his article based on his age, why don't you actually read it, and deal with what he wrote, not who he is. Slashdot is news for "nerds", right? I thought nerds didn't care about who a person is, only whether their arguments are logical and well supported by data/evidence/experiments?
I'm curious, does anyone have links to any resources which might explain the Department of Energy's involvement? Not that DoE can't be involved in basic materials research, but I suppose that they must have some sort of energy-related application in mind for such a material. I'm curious how this might advance energy?
I can imagine a LOT of potential uses for it, but a lot of those uses also would rely on other properties (not just strength), from structural, to piping, to casting boilers/reactors/turbines out of the material, to creating energy storage flywheels, storage containers for used nuclear fuel, etc, which all seem like a stronger material might be useful, but I honestly don't know enough to evaluate whether those would actually be potential uses for such a material? Is there some *particular* need for which steel is currently used, but steel is considered not as good a material as they actually need?
I'm not moving the goalposts. I've tried, in the little bit of time I had available, to research this, and I find multiple sources saying there was no smoking gun in the emails indicating Sarah Palin had misappropriately used her yahoo email.
I was also raising the point, which appears to be incorrect (though it seems strange it would be allowed for a court to use illegally obtained evidence) that *even if there was*, I think it is unjust to pursue justice using illegally obtained evidence. Why? Because there was no reason to believe, before breaking into her account, that anything illegal was happening, and we should NOT allow people to break the law just because *after the fact* they find some evidence of illegal activity.
In any case, there can be more than one point in a logical debate - more than one important criteria which need to be satisfied. Point one: where are the 'smoking gun emails'? Point two, it happens, may be invalid, I'll have to research a bit more about that, but I'm willing to concede it for now. It's not 'moving the goalposts' to try to enumerate multiple problems with an argument. Only when all potential problems are resolved, can you say you've reached the 'goal'.
I believe that evidence obtained illegally is inadmissible. If the leaks did show she was breaking the law, then that's a shame that this guy screwed up what could have been the evidence needed to indict and convict her. But, again, justice demands that courts should use legally obtained evidence. Which, in a way, makes this guy doubly at fault - illegal entry into the account, and interfering with evidence.
Yeah, tech has made the world smaller. In the 1700's or 1800's, incarcerating someone 300 miles away probably meant that the family either never could visit, if they were too poor, or might only see you once or twice a year. With planes, trains, and automobiles at prices that most folks can afford, 300 miles, while still inconvenient, does mean you can visit a bit more frequently.
It's still somewhat of a burden - I live about 300 miles from my parents (because that's where I found a job). I visit them maybe 5 or 6 times a year. It's a long enough drive that I don't really want to visit them more often than that, because if I'm going to visit them, I'm going for the entire weekend (you don't drive 5 hours to just visit someone for an hour or two, then drive 5 hours back home. . . well, ok you might if they were in prison, because you might only be allowed an hour or two to visit, but in general that's true).
While the Declaration of Independence does not have the weight of law, exactly, it very much informs our national laws.
From the document:
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. . .
. ..For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
While that just deals with the issue of the locality of trial, it does present an idea that justice should be relatively local. Trial should be local, and probably, incarceration should be local. You probably shouldn't incarcerate felons from California in, say, Maine or Florida.
For one thing, we try not to punish the families of criminals. This is why we allow family visitation rights. If you deny the criminal visitation rights, even if you think that's appropriate (say for someone convicted of murder, where the victim's family is cut off from the deceased), the problem becomes that you punish the innocent along with the guilty.
Relatively local incarceration means that you allow the innocent family members of the guilty to still be able to visit.
That said, this being a Federal crime and a Federal prison, it's not unreasonable that a convict would serve his term at a facility a few hundred miles away - I don't expect the Federal government to maintain a prison even in *every* state, let alone multiple per state. You commit a federal crime, it's not unreasonable for you to end up in a federal prison maybe one or two states away, if that's the nearest suitable facility for you to serve your sentence at.
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Hey, *real* developers/sysadmins use *rocks*.
Aside: I find it brilliant that all the one-upsmanship can come from the exact same source.
What if the primary mission for a particular artillery assault is to destroy the enemies weapons factories, and weapons stores, to hasten the end of the war, thereby perhaps saving more lives than are lost?
It's all well and good to say that these women were in the business of killing, but sometimes, war comes to you, you don't go looking for war. At that point your options are to fight, or to become a victim.
Put another way, I suppose that from the standpoint of an American, it's better that a German, Italian, or Japanese soldier dies, than that an American soldier dies. You don't have the choice of whether *someone* dies in such a case, you can only influence *who* is/are the ones dieing.
If you must fight, then it seems to me that the most moral choice is to hit your enemy as devastatingly as you can, as quickly as you can, to try to end the war as soon as you can. If you're going to hit a man, hit him hard enough he doesn't want to get back up and fight again, so to speak. I think in recent times, the expression "Shock and Awe" has been applied to this idea - convince your enemy it's not worth fighting, then you don't have to kill him. (Of course, it's hard to wage a shock and awe campaign against a guerrilla army, so it doesn't apply so much in asymmetric warfare scenarios).
Normally, I would agree with you, but the DDoS, in particular, upon the credit card companies was an organized, concerted effort by a *group* of people all working together. They all communicate together in a common forum (4chan). They aren't acting individually, they are acting corporately.
"What also puzzles me, is why cultures that create such structures, just kinda sorta die out? Like the Egyptians who built pyramids, whoever built Stonehenge, and the like?"
Every culture (well, there might be one or two exceptions, I don't know), at least most, die out once enough time passes, for a variety of reasons.
Look at the Egyptians first the Greeks conquered them, and started intermarrying with them and influencing/changing their cultures, then the Romans, then eventually, the Arab Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula invaded and conquered them.
Ethnic and Cultural intermixing is the natural path of all societies, sooner or later. Eventually that mixing happens to such a degree that we say that a new people have emerged - but they still carry on the genetic and cultural legacies of the peope's that they descended from. The ethnicities/cultures that are most 'pure' at this point, I believe, are mostly the ones that due to geography, were the most isolated for the longest periods of time.
Civil Disobedience is, as far as I know, marked by breaking unjust laws, and then *accepting the consequences* by going to jail, or whatever, to show society the unjustness of the laws, and to win sympathy to your cause.
I believe Anonymous stepped way over the line of Civil Disobedience long ago, with retaliation upon retaliation and attempting to avoid being caught. I really just have to view Anonymous as largely a group of criminals who deserve to be in jail for engaging in openly criminal activity - I can't see that laws which make it illegal to perform DDoSes against legal businesses, or to make unauthorized access to other people's computers, are fundamentally unjust.
These guys are definitely not in the same class as the followers of Ghandi or MLK.
What's wrong with comparing it to the Y2K bug? Oh, yeah, that's right, the Y2K bug was actually fixed in a timely fashion and the vast, vast majority of computers were ready for new years' day, 2000. Whereas IPv6 isn't comparable because people are listening and starting to implement change.
Also, there's no real 'hard-and-fast' deadline like there was with the Y2K bug - exhaustion of IPv4 address space won't cause the Internet to suddenly collapse - it will just begin to cause gradually escalating levels of pain, and slow down the rise of innovative new Internet services, websites, and companies, while driving up costs due to artificial scarcity.
My first amendment trumps your engineering license law: What part of, "Congress shall make no law. . .abridging. . .the right of the people. . .to petition the government for a redress of grievances." doesn't this guy understand?
You don't need a license, and the government cannot require a license, for a person to send in a letter petitioning the government for a redress of grievances. End of story. The government is free to ignore the petition, if engineers deem it to be technically flawed (or even if the engineers agree *grin*), but no law may be used to abridge the right of the people to petition the government which is exactly what this guy did.
Why is it so many government employees seem to lack a basic understanding of the Constitution?
On the downside, you're right, I agree that public IPv4 addresses will become something which becomes more expensive.
One of the things right now which is fighting against the wider adoption of IPv6 is that there's "no demand from end users" for IPv6. If you're ISP starts charging (or for people already paying for a static address or block, starts charging considerably more) for public IPv4 addresses, and people know that by switching to IPv6 they get free addresses, that creates demand for IPv6 ISP support, home routers, etc. If you can save $60/year using IPv6, as a home user, or hundreds to thousands of dollars a year for larger organizations, it might be financially worthwhile upgrading.
We likely won't need an IPv6 replacement until we've colonized most of the Universe. The IPv6 address space is 128 bits long, although the lower 64 bits are reserved for individual host addresses, so we could view the address space as being 65 bits wide.
That gives us 2^65 addresses, more or less.
2^65 = 3.68934881 Ã-- 10^19
So, that's 36.89 QUINTILLION addresses. That's really, really, a lot of addresses. To put this in perspective, according to WikiPedia, there's 100-400 Million stars in the Milky Way. If 50% of those stars had 1 colonizable planet, and we wanted to create an Intergalactic Internet (which, of course, would require faster-than-light comms, but, hey, this is just an example), so that we colonized 200 Million planets, each planet could have:
3.689 * 10 ^19 / 2 * 10^8 = 184 * 10^9 addresses per planet.
So, you get somewhere around 184 Billion addresses per planet. That's not an exact number, because, remember, I treated the address space as 65 bits. That's because you get a 64 bit network prefix, and a 64 bit host address. A network, however, can have more than 2 addresses (which, the simplification of saying we have 65 bits of addresses basically assumes an average of 2 hosts per network), so this estimate is probably actually low. On the other hand, allocation guidelines also 'waste' a lot of the address space (like saying that every household and small business should get their own /56 and larger businesses and organizations should get a /48, so that they can run their own subnets if they want), but we actually have plenty of address space to waste (no, really, we do - worst case scenario is that the IPv6 address space is basically 48 bits wide - that's still a LOT of network prefixes).
In general, I'm not a big fan of all the proposals by ISPs to limit user traffic, cap data, etc.
But, it seems to me that clamping down on DDoS's initiated by zombie networks would be a fabulous use of the related technologies. If the ISPs really want to cut down on traffic, start cutting off all the traffic from botnet zombies.
I wonder if they could even, using Deep Packet Inspection, figure out what traffic was specifically from the botnet, and refuse to route that traffic, while still allowing legitimate traffic (e.g. the user browsing the web with their web browser, playing online games, sending email, etc) from the same machines.
The 'catch' seems to be two things, near as I can tell:
1) A regulatory environment which does a good job of keeping us safe, but doesn't know how to handle the emergence of new technologies very well. I believe there are some substantial regulatory hurdles vis-a-vis any new nuclear reactor, which are not appropriate to Molten Salt Reactors, because they are pretty different from conventional Light Water Reactors.
2) R&D - Industry does some R&D, but most utility companies have no interest in spending 500 Million or a Billion dollars on basic research for 10 or 20 years before they'll be able to bring a product to market.
Probably, there'd be some utilities interested in investing in building LFTRs (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, another name for a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor), but who are not in the business of fundamental R&D. Someone needs to do the R&D first.
Vermont appears to be embracing the doctrine of efficiency. . . and they're probably about to lose the State's largest private employer - IBM has given warning that if the price of electricity rises the 25% which is expected when they shut down the state's only nuclear power plant next year, IBM will shut down their Vermont facility and move elsewhere. Meanwhile, a Vermont State Senator who sits on key committees related to this issue is on the record saying that the idea that everyone can have all the energy they want is "outdated".
I'm not exactly an "anti-efficiency" person (I use CFL bulbs at home, I try to minimize unnecessary driving, I live with the heat set kind of cool in my apartment and wear sweaters, etc), but you can't just hand-wave over the problem and say you just need more efficiency. Let's work on efficiency, but in the meantime, let's also work on making sure there's enough energy supply for everyone. Like the other poster mentioned, efficiency *and* increased generation, until the efficiency gains make it unnecessary to add more generation.
Also, there's one other thing to keep in mind. Nuclear energy, at least, is NOT SCARCE. There's really not a strong argument for saving a resource which is abundant. We can't possibly exhaust all the nuclear energy available in the world, at least in the time left before the Sun dies, and consumes the earth in fire (which is estimated to be in about 500 Million years, and we know about nuclear energy resources to last something like 700 Million years) - and that's just with fission.
Assuming we crack the fusion 'nut', then not only do we have 700 Million years worth of fission energy, but also Billions (maybe Trillions?) of years' worth of fusion energy.
Efficiency is looking to solve a problem we don't have - energy scarcity. I mean, *yes*, RIGHT NOW, in a world economy largely dependent on fossil fuels, we have energy scarcity problems. But, people resist the very solution to that problem - Molten Salt Reactors running on Thorium can make energy scarcity very much a problem of the past. They are inherently safe, clean, and should be very cheap (compared to current fission plant designs), as well.
I think there is a place for manufacturing, and jobs in manufacturing plants could still be good jobs - they're just different than in the past - more about maintaining the machines that make the stuff, than making it yourself. It also means a much smaller workforce per factory.
I actually think that a lot of Obama's proposals generally speak to issues that can help us have a revival of manufacturing, despite the ZDNet author's "outrage" that Obama has ceded manufacturing. . .
1) Getting more competitive tax rates: as much as people like to complain that corporations don't pay their 'fair share of taxes', the truth is corporations don't pay taxes - their customers do. Also, in a world of globalization, it becomes pretty easy for companies in a lot of industries to pack up and move to other countries with lower tax rates (of course, there are always types of businesses which *can't* move, because they are location-dependent - health care, energy, shipping, retail in-store sales, etc).
From a fundamental point of realism, the only way we can be attractive to businesses which are able to locate anywhere, is to have competitive tax rates. If we're the highest in the world, lots of businesses will move (or have already).
2) Taxes is only a part of the competitiveness picture - Obama also proposed simplifying government bureaucracy and regulations, to make businesses simpler. If the government can actually do that, that should make us a more attractive place to do business.
3) Lawsuit reform - I think Obama just talked about this in regards to medical malpractice lawsuits - which would be a good start by helping to reduce costs of healthcare back down to sane levels. But, let's extend this idea everywhere - reasonable lawsuits, are of course, necessary, but there's way too many lawsuits, with awards for way too many dollars, in the U.S.
Patent Trolls make it so any innovative company is almost guaranteed to be sued for patent infringement. Liability suits make it so any company is constantly living at the risk of big personal injury lawsuits, etc.
Try to build almost any sort of large industrial business in the U.S. and you'll get delayed for years by lawsuits by environmental activists groups, etc. That's part of the reason it's very hard and very expensive to build nuclear plants in the U.S. It's my understanding that's why no new petroleum refineries have been built in the U.S. for something like 20 or 30 years - they can't find a site to build a new refinery because of NIMBY lawsuits making it impossible. You can't build LNG transport terminals anywhere to import/export Natural Gas on ocean tankers.
If we want more jobs, particularly industry/manufacturing jobs in the U.S. we need to make it *possible* for companies to site and build facilities without decades of lawsuits and regulatory compliance issues making it impossible.
4) Obama talked about reducing the number of agencies that have overlapping control over various aspects of business (that whole Salmon example he gave) - that sure sounds like a reasonable, good proposal, and HEY, it might even reduce government spending by increasing efficiency, if you can do that, as well as making it easier to do business here.
5) Energy: Access to as much reliable, affordable electrical power as they need, is vital for any industry. After looking at this issue for about 2 years now, I currently think our best option right now to actually achieve that, while minimizing environmental hard, is Nuclear Power. The democrats are still a bit too enamored, I think, of wind and solar, and may squander a lot of money and opportunities by spending too much on the so-called "alternatives", and not enough on Nuclear, which is already proven to be safe, reliable, and able to produce abundant amounts of power.
We have a relatively small amount of nuclear plants in the U.S. - about 100 right now. For various reasons, we haven't built a single new reactor in about 15 or 20 years (I think the last new reacto
"sorry he got his 4 years of running the country into the ground and making healthcare worse. time to let someone else do it wrong."
Obama has only been in office two years (and a week).
The reason I would be highly surprised is that, among other things, I would expect this first release to remove every single occurence of the TRADEMARKED name OpenOffice.org.
Since I would expect OpenOffice to name its install directory, user config files/directory, and binary files using that trademark, and I would expect LibreOffice to rename all those things, I wouldn't really expect an overwrite. Basically, if LibreOffice includes the trademarked name anywhere in their distribution of the software, Oracle can sue them for trademark infringement (even though the code itself is GPL).
Possibly, there could be a library problem. E.g. on Linux, shared library files (.so) are usually installed to /lib, /usr/lib, or a couple other common directories. It might be possible that LibreOffice would ship with the same libraries, but a newer, incompatible version, which then might cause a problem for OpenOffice, but usually, library files include a version string as part of the library file's name, so that you can have multiple versions of the same libraries installed side-by-side.
So, really, they should probably show up to the OS as two completely different applications, even though one is a fork of the other.
If you're going to make movies, make movies. Requiring people to go to multiple other media to understand the movies is a recipe for failure. Most people expect the series of movies to form a coherent storyline without any important 'missing bits'. I don't mind video games, comic books, or short animations, but they should add to the universe in such a way that it doesn't leave holes in the main story told in the 'primary media'.
. . . is *more* fragmentation?
I don't know for sure, but seems to me there might be another factor here - duration. Lightning flash quite quickly, maybe a second at the longest. These morons with the lasers, if they happen to have good hand-eye coordination, might be able to track the aircraft pretty well, and keep the laser generally 'focused' on the cockpit windshield for several seconds at a time. I imagine it's sort of the difference between driving with occasional lightning flashes, vs having an oncoming vehicle shining their high-beams in your eyes for 5 or 10 seconds (which, at least for me, feels like an eternity when I'm driving at night, and am having a hard time seeing the road - and in just the wrong situation, might be long enough to cause an accident).
I believe, so far, there have been no fatalities as a result of these clowns, but should an aircraft ever crash, and the flight data recorder has the pilot complaining about being blinded by a laser, this will blow up into a huge media issue.
"tagging" something with an "encryption key" is something which doesn't make a lot of sense. I guess maybe someone would want to search for the file based on the key it was encrypted with? *grin*
You know an article is quality when stupid crap like that shows up in the very first paragraph. Who do these big media outlets hire to do their sci/tech articles anyhow? Apparently people who haven't got the faintest clue how things work, or how to explain to others how they work. Somehow, they seem to consistently find the absolutely *least qualified* people to write such articles.
Instead of attacking his article based on his age, why don't you actually read it, and deal with what he wrote, not who he is. Slashdot is news for "nerds", right? I thought nerds didn't care about who a person is, only whether their arguments are logical and well supported by data/evidence/experiments?
I'm curious, does anyone have links to any resources which might explain the Department of Energy's involvement? Not that DoE can't be involved in basic materials research, but I suppose that they must have some sort of energy-related application in mind for such a material. I'm curious how this might advance energy?
I can imagine a LOT of potential uses for it, but a lot of those uses also would rely on other properties (not just strength), from structural, to piping, to casting boilers/reactors/turbines out of the material, to creating energy storage flywheels, storage containers for used nuclear fuel, etc, which all seem like a stronger material might be useful, but I honestly don't know enough to evaluate whether those would actually be potential uses for such a material? Is there some *particular* need for which steel is currently used, but steel is considered not as good a material as they actually need?
I'm not moving the goalposts. I've tried, in the little bit of time I had available, to research this, and I find multiple sources saying there was no smoking gun in the emails indicating Sarah Palin had misappropriately used her yahoo email.
I was also raising the point, which appears to be incorrect (though it seems strange it would be allowed for a court to use illegally obtained evidence) that *even if there was*, I think it is unjust to pursue justice using illegally obtained evidence. Why? Because there was no reason to believe, before breaking into her account, that anything illegal was happening, and we should NOT allow people to break the law just because *after the fact* they find some evidence of illegal activity.
In any case, there can be more than one point in a logical debate - more than one important criteria which need to be satisfied. Point one: where are the 'smoking gun emails'? Point two, it happens, may be invalid, I'll have to research a bit more about that, but I'm willing to concede it for now. It's not 'moving the goalposts' to try to enumerate multiple problems with an argument. Only when all potential problems are resolved, can you say you've reached the 'goal'.
I believe that evidence obtained illegally is inadmissible. If the leaks did show she was breaking the law, then that's a shame that this guy screwed up what could have been the evidence needed to indict and convict her. But, again, justice demands that courts should use legally obtained evidence. Which, in a way, makes this guy doubly at fault - illegal entry into the account, and interfering with evidence.
Yeah, tech has made the world smaller. In the 1700's or 1800's, incarcerating someone 300 miles away probably meant that the family either never could visit, if they were too poor, or might only see you once or twice a year. With planes, trains, and automobiles at prices that most folks can afford, 300 miles, while still inconvenient, does mean you can visit a bit more frequently.
It's still somewhat of a burden - I live about 300 miles from my parents (because that's where I found a job). I visit them maybe 5 or 6 times a year. It's a long enough drive that I don't really want to visit them more often than that, because if I'm going to visit them, I'm going for the entire weekend (you don't drive 5 hours to just visit someone for an hour or two, then drive 5 hours back home. . . well, ok you might if they were in prison, because you might only be allowed an hour or two to visit, but in general that's true).
While the Declaration of Independence does not have the weight of law, exactly, it very much informs our national laws.
From the document:
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. . .
. . .For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
While that just deals with the issue of the locality of trial, it does present an idea that justice should be relatively local. Trial should be local, and probably, incarceration should be local. You probably shouldn't incarcerate felons from California in, say, Maine or Florida.
For one thing, we try not to punish the families of criminals. This is why we allow family visitation rights. If you deny the criminal visitation rights, even if you think that's appropriate (say for someone convicted of murder, where the victim's family is cut off from the deceased), the problem becomes that you punish the innocent along with the guilty.
Relatively local incarceration means that you allow the innocent family members of the guilty to still be able to visit.
That said, this being a Federal crime and a Federal prison, it's not unreasonable that a convict would serve his term at a facility a few hundred miles away - I don't expect the Federal government to maintain a prison even in *every* state, let alone multiple per state. You commit a federal crime, it's not unreasonable for you to end up in a federal prison maybe one or two states away, if that's the nearest suitable facility for you to serve your sentence at.